Introduction

The idea for this issue on Joyce and the Nonhuman began with a panel for the 2017 North American James Joyce Conference in Toronto on “Our Funnaminal World,” which later turned into the theme for the 2018 Zurich James Joyce Workshop (“Joycean Animals”). The topic came about as a result of our growing interest in animal studies and the nonhuman, specifically with reference to an increasingly technologically driven society. This theoretical context is one that intersects nicely with other theories—ecocriticism, Marxism, queer studies, gender studies, technology studies, postcolonialism, posthumanism, the blue humanities, psychoanalysis, deconstruction—but it also transcends these frameworks, in that it is specifically relevant to twenty-first-century issues. The lens of the nonhuman provides new insights into otherwise well-trodden pastures such as Bloom’s cat, Garryowen, and cattle, in addition to bestiality, animality, and the beastly. As this volume shows, however, it also opens up the field to animals, objects, and concepts that have received less attention, for example, chimera, hybrids, monstrosities, cephalopods, plesiosaurs, embodiments, and bicycles.

This special issue consolidates and builds on recent work in Joyce Studies, including Robert Brazeau’s and Derek Gladwin’s Eco-Joyce: The Environmental Imagination of James Joyce; Alison Lacivita’s The Ecology of “Finnegans Wake”; Vike Martina Plock’s special issue of the James Joyce Quarterly on “Joyce and Physiology,” which featured animals prominently in essays by David Rando and Sam Slote; and a first wave of essays on “Joyce, Animals and the Nonhuman” in Katherine Ebury’s special issue of Humanities.¹ Other milestone essays within Joyce Studies have included Maureen O’Connor’s chapter on Joyce’s signifying animals;² Plock’s essay on both human and nonhuman bodies in Ulysses;³ Robert Haas’s essay in ANQ;⁴ Cathryn Setz’s chapter on Shem the Penman in her recent monograph;⁵ and Margot Norris’s and Cliff Mak’s essays on animal figures in Finnegans Wake.⁶ Our special issue has also been initiated as an addition to recent developments in literary theory, such as Richard Grusin’s The Nonhuman Turn (2015), and the new interpretations of the works of Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Donna Haraway, Jane Bennett, and N. Katherine Hayles (to name a few) .

Grusin’s collection The Nonhuman Turn, in particular—inspired by the proceedings of his innovative 2012 conference of the same name, which included influential contributions from senior theoretical scholars from a range of fields, such as Bennett, Timothy Morton, and Steven Shaviro—has offered a crucial step forward for the Joyce scholars included in this special issue. According to Grusin’s introduction, in a project designed to be “politically liberatory,” the method aims to “extend our academic and critical concern to include nonhuman animals and the nonhuman environment, which had previously been excluded or ignored from critical or scholarly humanistic concern.”⁷ The nonhuman turn differs from an earlier generation of posthuman scholarship, Grusin indicates, in that while the posthuman “oscillate[s] between seeing the posthuman as a new stage in human development from human to something after the human and seeing it as calling attention to the inseparability of human and nonhuman,” the nonhuman turn focuses entirely on the latter approach in which the two are intertwined (ix). While this focus on the nonhuman is undeniably a twenty-first-century development, some of the central reference points for scholars across Grusin’s volume are key modern-ist thinkers such as Henri Bergson and Alfred North Whitehead (viii), with Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, and especially the “Shem the Penman” section, being a core orientation for the final essay by Jane Bennett.⁸ For Bennett, Joyce’s work (as well as Walt Whitman’s) is a case study of how “texts are bodies that can light up, by rendering human perception more acute, those bodies whose favoured vehicle of affectivity is less wordy: plants, animals, blades of grass, household objects, trash” (234–35).

By examining Joyce alongside the “nonhuman turn,” we find that Bennett’s intervention shows that, rather than simply applying a new critical methodology to his work, the conditions are right to acknowledge Joyce’s...